


Seven Stories

by thatsrightdollface



Category: The Umbrella Academy (Comics), The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Dream Logic, F/M, Gen, M/M, One story per chapter, fairytale-ish stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2019-11-29 12:26:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 10,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18223139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Fairytales for the Umbrella Academy team.Number One: The Orbit of Us AllNumber Two: Such Deep WaterNumber Three: Sweetest WordsNumber Four: Grave Dirt and Its PromisesNumber Five: Wasteland's ChildNumber Six: Horror Becomes YouNumber Seven: Play for Me, Too - There was once a girl hidden in the catacombs under a theater, and she didn’t know anyone could hear her music at all until it was much too late.





	1. The Orbit of Us All

**Author's Note:**

> Hi -- I hope you enjoy this if you read it!!! Story one of seven. I've been having a lot of fun with this project, ahahaha. Dream logic and character analysis!!!
> 
> I tagged this for The Umbrella Academy as a comic, too, 'cause I've been taking inspiration from it in pieces as well... Though everything is definitely more focused on the show. Thank you so much for reading this far, and I hope you have a great day! :D

_There was once a boy who was sent to cold, far-off places for his family.  He became hungry searing stars and the ice scabbed over asteroids, in time._

Many years ago, Spaceboy would have thought it was ridiculous to imagine he could ever forget what the earth looked like, exactly, or the feeling of its atmosphere holding him tight. Its gravity, its soft gold sun on his skin.  He would have laughed and shaken his head, assuring anyone, _everyone_ that he could never grow so far away as all that.  He’d have said it in the same sort of voice he used to say things like “Don’t Panic,” and “We Will Handle This,” back then.

The earth would always mean someone else’s hand in his, reaching back to him, and a team that would answer when he sent words out into the dark. Spaceboy genuinely believed in that.

Back then, in those now swallowed-up days, there was a man who wasn’t _quite_ human running around, and this man tried building children out of power and need, out of expectations none of them could understand.  He built Spaceboy first, some people said, or maybe he only set him in front of the line because he was quick to nod his head earnestly and smash whatever needed smashing. For the good of this father; for the good of his team, and...  He was promised... The world.

Now, this man that was not human — this man that wanted things no human could truly know — carved his children’s hair out of plastic like a batch of action figures, and he wrote their pain and purposes on the rubbery surface of their hearts with a thick black pen.  Some of the children tried to smear those words away, as they grew up into adults with chipped plastic skin and frightened memories.  They scrubbed and scrubbed, hissing the angriest words through their perfectly painted-on teeth.

Not Spaceboy, though.  He loved some of the words written on his heart more than he knew how to love his own self.  He had been built for heroism and justice, those words insisted, for adventure and the stars beyond the edges of his sky.  The man who was not human had come from beyond those stars, actually, and he sent Spaceboy to meet them, too. Just a little at a time, at first.  Testing him against the void, seeing how quickly pieces of him could break away into the dark.

The man who was not human must not have been the sort of child who minded breaking his toys, once upon a time.  Maybe he only kicked them under the bed and went out to find some more.

Let’s not talk about _why_ , this time, alright?  Let’s just say this: one day, Spaceboy was sent beyond the earth.  He was told it was for his father, just like everything else had been.  Just like fighting and bowing his head when he felt he had to; just like assuring everyone not to panic in his very surest voice.  He was told this mission was for his team, and for that whole fragile world.

Spaceboy followed all the instructions that were sent to him, until the instructions stopped coming.  He rattled around in his softly lit space-rooms and pretended everything was normal until the lights died, too.  The food was gone, and the world was silent, and there didn’t seem to be any reason to stay in the dark.  But Spaceboy didn’t think he could return before his father wanted him, before he’d done what needed to be done.  He was afraid some of the important words might be scribbled off his heart in punishment, perhaps; he was afraid he’d let someone down, let down his purpose.  His planet.

Spaceboy wished his team would call to him, would answer him, but as he drifted out further into the deep of the world beyond his world he felt the changes come on slowly.  He’d spent so long pacing around on the moon that he had the dust ground into his skin, now, and shaking around inside his rubber heart. It lit up in him like bright white glass when the sun hit just right.  He started surveying comets that passed, and he gathered up their fire so that it melted the tips of his plastic fingers.  He lassoed asteroids and dragged them to his base, for his father, for gifts, and their ice started scabbing inside his mouth, clipping all his words.  That was funny.  He had been sort of chatty, once.

Spaceboy made reminders of his old teammates out of glowing, shivering metal from inside some of those asteroids, too — jewelry for someone he loved, who hadn’t called for him since before his heart had filled with moon dust.  He woke up his father’s contraptions and took them so far into the dark that he began to see other planets too like the earth but _not quite_ whenever he tried to bring up that homeworld in his mind’s eye.  The layout of the continents; the specific blue of the oceans.  Spaceboy found himself flipping through old, old encyclopedias to remind himself, sometimes.

The encyclopedia pages were fading, though. Those blues weren’t quite right anymore, were they?

Spaceboy mapped out so many unmapped places, and he wore the light of unnamed stars in his too-real painted eyes.  No matter how far he went — no matter what he forgot, no matter how many messages he sent with silence waiting on the other end — he always came back to the earth, again.  He was in its orbit, even if he couldn’t remember exactly what different flavors of ice cream had been called or the last time someone had said his name outloud.

He would always come back around, always check in, Spaceboy thought.  That was the way it was, circling his callings the way planets circled the sun.  He thought he would have heard if his father didn’t need him anymore; he thought he would have heard if his father had died.

It was so cold, up there, and for so long.

By the time someone came to find him on the moon…  Came to bring him home…  Spaceboy was difficult to recognize.  She told him he had truly become his name, hadn’t he?  She said it with a nervous laugh, and stepped over all his father’s whirring contraptions in the dark.  She looked uneasy, here, but not afraid of him.  There was that, at least.  She might have worn some of the jewelry he’d made for her; she had remembered him, despite everything, and she seemed familiar and impossible all at once.

Her plastic skin was painted with rose gold makeup the same way Spaceboy’s was painted with moon dust and time, with ash and ice and the hunger of far away stars.  She held out a hand and asked, “Why did you leave for so long?”

Spaceboy didn’t know what to say for a minute.  He looked down at the writing on his heart as if it might know the answer, but none of that flouncy, long-ago penmanship could really be read, there, anymore.


	2. Such Deep Water

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again!!! Story two out of seven. :D This one is dedicated to my friend CytosineSkald, because Diego is her favorite. 
> 
> Also potentially of note: Diego’s comic costume, with the skull on it… And the stripes… I can’t look at it and not think about pirates. So. Hence all the pirate stuff in this story? :P
> 
> I hope you enjoy this!!! Thank you so much for reading, and I'm sorry for anything I might've gotten wrong.

_There was once a boy who didn’t need to breathe. He made knives out of sea serpent bones in the lawless dark waters._

There were giant squids...  Krakens, or something sort of like them...  Around there, sure, in the dark ocean. They reached with their restless, winding so-many arms, huger than huge and with staring eyes larger than human heads.  He had drifted beside those squids, studying them just out of sight, not needing to breathe.

He had claimed those dark places a long time ago, by that point. The deep water, the bloody water.  People called him the Kraken, now, and he had sort of decided what that meant.  Grappling in awful places.  Claiming the deep and the lawless as his own.  Becoming something to fear.  That was what he _wanted_ it to mean, anyway, though sometimes the newspapers on shore said something else.

Oh well, right?  Screw them.  The Kraken told himself he cared more about doing some good in the world than what anyone could possibly think.

When the Kraken was young, he had lived on a boat with six other children and a man who sent them out into the world to bring home treasures.  Sometimes he sent them to other boats where bad people had funny whispering chemicals or weird machines or lots and lots of money to bring back to the bank.  Sometimes he sent them down to infiltrate submarines and steal secret plans; sometimes he sent them to islands where they would have to smile for cameras and say their father’s way was good and right.

The Kraken wasn’t sure about any of that, though.  He wanted to lead and claim his own path; he wanted to be put at the front of the line where his strong, shy-smiling brother always stood looking at the stars.  The Kraken had to work extra hard to get his voice to come out right, sometimes, but he felt like a storm over the ocean inside…  All of him fast and shattering, all of him movement and change.  When his voice came out the way he meant it, he wanted so badly to be threatening criminals with words like steel in the air. Like a knife that always hit home, somehow.

“We’ll follow Father’s orders,” the Kraken’s brother, the leader, said.  “He gives them to me, and I give them to you.  That’s how it is.”

The Kraken felt something deep in him uncoiling, hearing that — something furious and old as the sea.

He didn’t always know why the man sent his children where he did.  He didn’t know if these were the best battles to fight, the best tactics to use, the best world to invent a little at a time every day.  If someone had asked him, the Kraken might have said every moment sealed in on his father’s boat felt like holding his breath, like struggling to breathe, but of course he couldn’t know what that felt like.

The boat where the Kraken grew up was a stern and intricately carved thing, all chiming old brass clocks and books in sealed glass cases to keep out the coming mold.  That was on _top_ , though.  The Kraken didn’t need air, didn’t need earth, and so he spent a lot of time underwater.  He saw the gnawing leaks forming in that ship’s proud hull, and he saw the barnacles crusted over it all. The rot and the sick. The darker side.

That ship was so small in such a wild, sprawling ocean.  It was a lot of rules and soggy, water-warped floorboards; it was a lot of promises and a captain who could drown in minutes if he ever fell over the balcony.

The Kraken ran away into deep water, after a time, and he started carving himself new knives out of sea serpent bones and wearing armor he dragged from the corpses of long-lost ships.  It became understood by all the criminal types in those waters and on the shores around that a phantom patrolled there.  Kept a kind of sharp and quipping peace — came from the coldest water without needing to reach at breath.  He would leave people tied up with anchor chains, seaweed in their hair.  He would leave them waterlogged and half-believing in ghosts, talking wide-eyed about what they’d seen in the deep.  He was a drowned man, maybe…  He was an executed pirate with the shadow of an old rope dangling around his neck, or a soldier who could never die.  Sometimes people got blurry pictures of him, grinning cockily under the swaying glow of a lighthouse.

People grew curious about the Kraken. Some tried to catch him in mossy steel nets...  Some wanted to search his neck for gills, or borrow his blood to come to understand him.

The Kraken, of course, would not be caught.  He gathered up enough to eat from the ocean, and he slept in booby-trapped caves where he thought maybe his father couldn’t come to drag him back.  If he missed his brother the leader’s steady voice, he told himself he didn’t.  If he missed the other children, too, gathered around a porthole in the deep of their father’s boat and watching fish sweep through the coral below, he told himself he didn’t need siblings around to play pranks on.  Didn’t _need_ anyone at all.

It could be part of the Kraken missed working with other living beings, though — even if he couldn’t be the leader all the time, even if human worlds came along with all sorts of secret chains.  He started climbing up onto the warm solid earth more and more often to tease a woman of the law, after all.  It took a while, but maybe not so long as he might have expected.  She kept investigating all the places where he’d spread his new justice beyond the sea.  At first he had wanted to stop her, or lead her around on a chase until she gave up and drifted away...  But then he wanted to know her, bit by bit.

“Vigilante,” this woman of the law called the Kraken.  “Phantom.”  “Scoundrel.”  She rolled her eyes at the dead pirates’ steel he wore, sometimes, but bit her tongue when he smiled.

After plenty of “chance” meetings and banter, plenty of salt water on her skin, this woman learned the Kraken’s other, more human names.  He showed her the treasures he’d found in the ocean’s dark places, and she told him how to train at an academy and join the team she belonged to.  It wasn’t like his father’s had been, she said.  It wasn’t like being on one boat in the middle of endless deep, watching his father study maps as gaudy chandeliers shifted above them, rattling with the waves.

The Kraken thought it would be alright if he grew to strain against this new team, too.   If this woman tried to study him, or chain him, or handed him over to other men like his father who might have boats of their own, stranding him behind new locked doors.  He could always give himself back to the water, after all.  The ocean was huge and wild enough to hide anyone, and the darkness…  You’ll remember…  Belonged to him just like the storm in his voice, just like the knives and bitterness and biting salt air.

When the Kraken said something sort of like that to the woman of the law, she reached over and ruffled his hair a little.  She told him she hoped he’d talk to his brothers and sisters again, someday, whatever life on his father’s boat had been like.

And he surprised himself by saying yeah, yeah maybe so – (hopefully so?) – and actually meaning that.


	3. Sweetest Words

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back – story three out of seven. You know the drill~~~ Dang these are fun to write.
> 
> Have a wonderful day!

_There was once a girl who could speak the earth into candy and the sky into blood, if she felt like it.  She didn’t want to be her own story, anymore._

It was hard to remember what the forest had been like before the Rumor grew up there.  She was one of seven children living tucked among the trees, and maybe some people could faintly recall those children being led through the town nearby, every now and then, in a neat, hurried line.  Buying milk and eggs and plain cloth to make uniforms.  That was before, of course.  Before the Rumor learned how to speak her magic so, so well.

The Rumor’s words were like sticky sugar syrup, changing everything, seeping into her world and dying it whatever flavor she wanted.  Just a few words, laughed as a joke or whispered like the most solemn vow in the world.  That was all it took.

She was one of seven children.  That remained the same.  She lived in a forest with sweet berries and tangled roads and starlight through the trees.  That stayed the same, too, though so many things didn’t.

The forest hadn’t _always_ had chocolate trees that melted a little in the sun and reformed into strange shapes under the moonlight, had it?  Of course not.  The leaves weren’t always crystalline rock candy in so many flavors, either, catching like stained glass in the sun and painting the candy roads with all sorts of shifting rainbows.  The town wasn’t always so full of smiling, gentle-voiced doll people and clever animals with stories to tell and aprons to tie on over their fur in the morning.

The Rumor had made all those things so, just the way she kept it from raining when she wanted to go for a walk.  She meant very well.  It was supposed to be a pretty, safe and welcoming world, and she was supposed to be seen. People were supposed to come to her when they had questions or problems, and she would help. She would make all those problems go away with only a handful of words.

The Rumor turned her hair into smoke or sunlight depending on her mood; the Rumor wore fluffy boas and ribbons instead of uniforms.  There was one boy in the world who had loved her before she turned the town into something so sweet, so beautiful, but he wouldn’t go out into the world she was bending by her side.  She didn’t exactly _ask_ , but she thought she knew he wouldn’t unless she bent him, too.  Someone had to stay at that house in the forest and take care of everything.  Even if the chickens turned into dragons with opal scales and names like rambling awestruck poetry — even if the forest wound itself into a music box labyrinth and he could never find his way to town again.  Even then, she knew this boy would stay as long as he felt needed.

The Rumor thought of changing his mind, but something in her whispered that she shouldn’t.  Something still wondered what the rain would feel like in her hair, and what flowers had been like before she’d made them all cotton candy perfect.

There had been seven children living in that house in the forest, but soon there was only one.  Some of them had moved to the town, by now, and one of them patrolled the forest relentlessly for bandits and ne’er-do-wells.  The Rumor left her toy town behind, with the air smelling like melting chocolate and her sort of wanting to gag on it, by now.  It was all so much the same.  She grew up not knowing exactly what her face would have turned out like if she didn’t keep telling the world it was flawless, flawless — she grew up wandering from world to world and remaking everything into what she thought mattered at the time.

A kingdom of jewels, with people whose skin cracked open like a geode as they grew, revealing sharp crystal scales...  A kingdom of mirrors and lights and music, where all eyes watched the Rumor as she spoke contentment and safety into the world again and again, smiling for the camera.  She was a star.  Her name was on everyone’s lips — people wondering where she’d come from, people asking to be remade.

Sometimes, the Rumor held one of those mirrors in both her hands and wanted so badly to speak the words: “Maybe I’m not perfect.”

“Maybe I can cry, and bleed, and have days where the wind blows my hair in my face.

“I heard a rumor I don’t have to be perfect.”

But she didn’t speak them, not for a long time.

The Rumor tried on so many roles until she found one she thought might fit her well: she made another candy world, only this one was a castle by an ocean of sweet blueberry syrup.  It was familiar, but also her own.  She made herself a home, she said.  She said this so many times that she believed it, even as part of her shook her head and winced when she remembered she might never, never leave.

She wanted a home, after all, more than she could say.  Not a pressed and tidy little house with a strict father in the dark of the woods, no.  But a home.

And now she had something royal and sweet and new.  Gummy fish leaping through glinting sugar water; a sunrise that melted over everything like butterscotch and golden caramel and strawberry pink.  The Rumor leaned over a balcony and spoke herself a man, one day.  He was meant to look like someone she knew, but not enough that it would hurt _every_ time she looked at him.  He was beautiful, and he was safe, and he couldn’t help but love her with all his heart because she spoke him so.

The Rumor lived with this man for a long time.  They had a daughter, and the Rumor said she looked just like her...  Although, of course, it was hard to say if that would have been true.  Did this daughter look like she had long ago, when she wore only a human smile and spoke only easy human words?  When she had walked in a line of seven children, marching carefully out of the forest together?  Walking as if they might be together for all time.

Would the Rumor ever see her daughter’s own and actual face?

That was what inspired the Rumor to speak herself back to something like normality again, that first time — she wanted to know if her daughter truly looked like her, now.  She wanted to know who she was, so her daughter could know.  She wanted her to grow up sure of what clean air tasted like; she wanted her to swim in an ocean that wouldn’t leave her hair so sticky.

The Rumor wanted to see her daughter smile honestly, and give the man she had spoken into being a chance to choose his own life. Too late, maybe. Much too late.

She was both the woman trapped in the enchanted candy house and the witch who had trapped herself in there.  She wanted to claw her way out, frosting under her fingernails, and see if the boy...  The man...  Who had loved her once was still waiting in that old left-behind forest.

He might have followed her, if she’d asked...  Or, if she’d tried, she might have found herself staying there with him the whole time.

Maybe the trees could gather up their old green leaves back, if they wanted them.  Maybe those old paths wound the same way as before, and chocolate roots had still known how to sink deep into the earth.


	4. Grave Dirt and Its Promises

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhhhh, I hope this one came out okay!!! Thank you so much for reading this far~
> 
> Four out of seven!!! Gasp. (Also… Posted on 4/4??? I only just realized that could be the case yesterday!!)

_There was once a boy who was beloved by all the world’s dead things.  He worked so hard to slam the Door of Death shut, until someone he loved passed just beyond it._  

So many people had lived and died, just millions and millions of them all over the place forever, always rushing by like flies on a...  Well, you know. That was a constant.  It made a certain grim and incredibly irritating sense that wherever the Séance went someone had died there.   There were always bones buried somewhere under the pavement, or bloodstains on the trees that had been washed away long ago.  But, hey, the world remembered that blood, anyway.  Death was everywhere, watching.

Yeah, everybody called him “the Séance,” now.  It sounded more dramatic than he usually felt.  All the world’s dead things had hung around him since before he could open his eyes.  The first face he remembered seeing, actually, must have been a dead one.  Someone no one else he knew remembered peering into his crib with a big, knowing smile.

The Séance was one of seven children born with magic in their blood, with strangeness sunken deep into their bones like a promise. One had magic in the sort of strength that could keep everyone around him safe, most of the time; another’s magic was in her voice.  The last one’s magic could not be spoken —their caretaker said — or the sky would fall apart.

The Séance wished his own magic was like that, sometimes.  Hard to reach, forbidden.  Dead things stretched out from under his bed and grabbed his ankles at night, instead, when he wandered into the kitchen for a drink or something; dead things watched him in the mirror just behind his reflection, skin papery grey and eyes murky.  Fishlike.  Always close enough to touch, and usually talking.

It was all because of the Door of Death, in the end.  The Séance’s caretaker had told him about it when he was much too small to know.  Once a person heard about the Door of Death, they knew it was waiting to swallow them up all the time.  A door of rotten vines and bones twisted beyond skin, beyond human shape.  Spines braided prettily together around tarnished silver words that no one living could read.  The Séance had been born with words from the Door of Death already spinning around in his mind.  He was tied to it, and so all the world’s dead things knew how to reach him.  They would come and find him as long as the door could open.

To other people, it must have seemed like the Séance was always telling a silent world to be quiet for just a second so he could think.  There _was_ someone there, though, of course.  Someone nearby.  The Séance’s caretaker sent him to crypts and graveyards, buried him in tombs for a long, long time.  Long enough that part of him would be there forever, probably, with spiders and bits of crumbled headstone in his hair.  Helping him learn his ties to the dead.  _Helping_ the Séance – his caretaker might have honestly thought that.

But the whole world was a tomb, wasn’t it?  Living alleys and citadels, towers and restaurants all just so much space for the dead to hang around in.  The Séance covered his ears so he couldn’t hear any of it, and he blurred his eyes so it seemed like a dream.  He drowned the whole grey rotten world in liquid neon light.  At first, he thought that light was just meant for a little while, like a Band-Aid...  But then he forgot what it was like to hear anything over the pounding of music, of need, of forgetting and weightlessness.

Why did the dead want to mess around with _him_ , anyway?  Wouldn’t they rather be weightless, too?  Wouldn’t they rather rest, finally, rest and forget everything, everything?

Now, long ago, the Séance’s caretaker had told him that all dead things had to climb up through a maze and out into the living world.  They had to knock on the Door of Death and wait patiently for it to creak itself open so they could climb through.  The maze of the dead was filled with everything they had lived, everything they’d lost and failed and wanted.  But still, they climbed.  Still, they dripped back out into the world they’d left behind and went to go lurk around the Séance’s favorite nightclubs.

The more the Séance tried to reason it through, the more it felt like the Door of Death was really just causing more trouble for everybody.  More trouble for the dead, who’d have to make this awful journey only to drift around lonely and unfulfilled and bugging the Séance forever…  More trouble for him, because he hadn’t slept in what felt like weeks.

So one day, the Séance and his brother — a brother with churning monsters deep inside his skin — set off to cut all his ties to the Door of Death.  He was going to reason with its keepers, or jam the door shut with a large brick or something for a while.  Just long enough for him to live, if he could.  Just long enough to breathe.

The Séance’s brother worried about him, and said sure, sure, he was along for the ride.  At the very least maybe he could help keep the Séance out of trouble.

They traveled for a long time, down crooked roads where all the houses had cracked windows and slithering things behind the mirrors, under slimy tunnels where hollow mouths gaped from deep in the sludge, rattling breath.  They found maps in hidden libraries under abandoned record shops, and used up a lot more of the Séance’s brother’s savings than he probably would have wanted to.

Finally, they came across a group of men in muddy military gear who were going by the Door of Death, too.  At first the Séance didn’t ask why.  One of the men was golden and gentle, after all.  He was funny, and his hands were soft and cold when they clapped the Séance on the arm.  Making friends so quickly.

They became something else, too, something tender and worth staying awake for, as they traveled together.  The Séance’s brother teased him, but only a little bit.  The Séance had kissed this man in the military uniform plenty of times before he understood why someone like _him_ needed to go check out the Door of Death.  He had gone dancing with him, and puzzled over cryptic ancient maps with him, and gotten to know him at least as well as he had known anyone else outside his family, it felt like.

The Séance realized what was happening as they were crawling down the crusted and sour-smelling corridor just outside the maze of the dead, just on the edge of the living world.  His golden soldier was becoming grey, turning to an old film reel, going airy as tissue paper.  He looked exhausted, now, and there was something far away in his eyes.

The Door of Death drew the Séance’s soldier in, like snuffing out a candle, soon enough.  He and all his company with him; all the dead reporting for duty, giving themselves to the dark.  There were so many people dying all the time, after all.  The doors couldn’t be expected to go claiming everybody by themselves.

“I’ll climb back out,” the Séance’s soldier told him, voice like an echo already, like footsteps down a hall in another part of the house.  “I’ll climb back out, and I’ll see you again.”

And then he was gone.

The Séance took a long, aching breath.  He studied a few of the words he’d had festering in the back of his mind all the time, as long as he could remember.  They felt sweeter than anything his caretaker could have taught him.  Maybe the words carved so deep into him, so deep into the Door of Death, had been about hope all this time.  Had been about togetherness, and forgiving, and a chance to hold on to what you loved even when reality itself said “No.”

The Séance met his brother’s eyes, and he suddenly hated that he’d been imagining so many ways to prop that door shut to him, even just for a little while.  The dead weren’t what his caretaker had made them, after all; the grave dirt was more than a promise of whispers and pounding on heavy stone doors no one would open for you.  The Séance, trapped in a crypt and begging to go out into the sun again; the dead, after climbing through their maze and back to the world.

The Séance smiled at the door, softly. Wonderingly. “Maybe I’ll go help him find the way out,” he said.

His brother nodded.  Smirked.  Said, “When do we start?”


	5. Wasteland's Child

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiiiiiiiii! Thank you so much for reading/making it all the way to story five!!! I hope you have fun with this one. :D

_There was once a boy who could escape anything — time, space, even prophesy.  He came so close to losing himself... Except for some sandwiches waiting by the door every night._

The boy everyone called Five was mostly made of air — air and breathless scribbled calculations, air and quickness.  He had a snappy comeback for everything, and he moved faster than a blink.  Nothing in the whole world could hold him, not even the fortress his father had carved deep, deep in the earth where no fresh air was supposed to be able to sneak its way in.

Back when Five was still trapped in that fortress so much of the time, with its swaying moonstone chandeliers and stalactite ceilings dripping ancient water into everybody’s morning oatmeal, there were other children, too.  The first, sitting at their father’s side, was formed out of loyal earth...  His skin was carefully-molded clay, and he had very trusting eyes.  The last child, at the end of the table and scowling down into her bowl, was formed out of sharp white fire.  It was hard for her to flicker, in a place like that.  In the damp dark, without any wind to wake her.  Some people said _she_ was why their father had moved them under the earth — so her flames wouldn’t grow too hot.  So she wouldn’t burn everything up into crisp unrelenting white, into shrieking power and music.

That fire-girl — that banished, unforgiven girl — was always kind to Five.  She had a soft voice, nowadays...  Though maybe he sort of remembered her snapping necks, before, or making fire coil up someone’s throat so they choked on burning white light. She was nervous, now, and kept her head down.  Sometimes that first child, child of the earth, had to remind everyone to be quiet so they could hear her.

Five and the girl made all out of fire didn’t belong in a place like that, and they knew it as well as they knew all the winding subterranean hallways, all the ballrooms lit by creeping luminous moss.  But because he was a creature of the air — because his smile was a shrewd, slippery thing, because his voice was so sharp and he could disappear without a sound — Five was able to dart up to the surface world and back again and again without anybody being the wiser.  He brought back games and books; he brought back music for the fire-girl to practice on her violin.

Things might have gone like that forever, except that Five always wanted to climb farther, escape longer, push himself beyond everything he knew.  The air can be like that.  Their father made all sorts of prophetic statements, piecing them together from ancient writings carved into some of the strangest halls in that fortress.  He said that Five would never learn to shift through time the way he could through space.  He said an apocalypse was coming, an end to all things, and the only way to keep it off was to stay in dark places and protect all the villages in the tunnels.  Become heroes to the miners and the blind lizard folk in their grey cold ponds.  Become heroes where no flames could burn the way they should out in open air.

The fire-girl pretended she didn’t want to cry when he said things like that, but Five knew better.  When she cried, it was like candle wax dribbling down her cheek and leaving new ridges.  New reminders, because a consuming flame couldn’t quite melt them all away.  Everybody knew, even if most of them had the common courtesy not to say anything.

Five refused to believe that this was it, this was their world and all they’d ever be.  He refused to believe his siblings would never stand in the sun again, even his brother who was made to think he’d been formed for this subterranean world, formed to follow and listen.  That earth-child loved books about _adventures_ , after all, and Five had watched him sketch out constellations on his ceiling, humming to himself and thinking he was all alone.

None of his siblings deserved this...  And _nobody_ deserved to hold Five with their words.  His power meant slipping beyond everything, after all.  If the world was made up of expectations like bird cages, Five had been born to pass through all the bars and shake his head mockingly on the other side.  He was sure of that.

And so Five practiced phasing through time the same way he phased through air and dirt, phased halfway across the world before anyone knew he was gone.  He didn’t tell his family when he ran away to practice on the day it actually _worked_ , though, and he became lost without saying goodbye to anyone.

In other worlds, the wasteland came differently.  In other worlds, Five grew old among shambling buildings, coughing up ruined air and waving weapons at nothing.   But suppose it went a new way, here.  Suppose a wasteland can be restlessness itself; suppose a wasteland can mean never stopping to catch his breath, just unglued from everything.

Five saw the world how it would be, if they came to the surface in his father’s prophesy: everything was charred, shriveling like papers tossed in a fireplace, and the white flames danced as if to a laughing violin.  The sky was white too, white with a sweet wicked smoke, and everyone was broken.

But he didn’t stay there long.

Five saw the dawn of things and the first lizard folk crawling in the mud, hissing ancient language.  He tasted a gulp of fresh, sour air.

Five saw frantic parties in forests tangled with bones; Five saw skyscrapers rise and crack apart until vines claimed them back and deer with many eyes nibbled flowers from inside what used to be computer monitors.  Five saw everything and nothing.  At first he was amazed, triumphant.  At first he cackled to himself about how amazingly wrong his father had been.  About how no words could hold him, no time, no laws.

 _And maybe, horribly, that was true._ Even when Five tried grabbing on to time, next, it came unraveled all around him.  He would try to freeze in a moment and it only shook him off into the next one.  Nothing lasted.  There was nothing to focus on.  It was possible Five’s senses would have lost all their meaning, soon enough.  It was possible he would’ve finally melted back into the air itself — the air that was most of his floating proud blood, most of his nature. He would’ve been as free as anything had ever been and terrified beyond thought.

Wastelands come in so many shapes, the same as paradise.

It was impossible to tell how long Five drifted there, unreal, feeling like an unfocused picture...  Feeling like mist, watching pieces of the world through so much distance.  It was too long, anyway.  It was a bad dream, or it was decades.

He smelled peanut butter though, after a while.  He had always liked peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches.

And there it was.  A glimpse of the fire-girl, standing on a step-stool and making a sandwich just how Five used to like it, the smoldering white flames of her hair tied back into a low ponytail.  She was frowning down at her hands, concentrating.  It wasn’t the first sandwich she had made.  Five could tell by her technique, somehow.

He watched the fire-girl hop off her stool and carry the sandwich to the door of their fortress deep under the earth.  She sat with it for a little while, not even taking a single bite.  She stared at the door, expecting it to open.  Of course it never did.  All the others were probably asleep.

When that image faded, and another moment came...  Well, Five howled.  He howled and thrashed against this new cage, this endlessness, this freedom-as-a-trap.  Little by little, this fury turned to will.

So Five would never learn how to control his travel through time, would he?  Some prophesy.

That couldn’t possibly be true.

It took training.  It took so long, and Five thought maybe he had seen half the age of the planet go by before he finally broke free of that awful freedom.  But he did.  Nothing could hold him, after all, not even the very idea of not being held.

When Five phased back into the earth, he found his father’s fortress a lot like he had left it.  That wouldn’t be allowed to last long, he knew. He was back, and he changed the rules, didn’t he?  His brother the earth-child had grown into a man, with new clay muscles smoothed onto his rocky bones.  He knew the names of so many constellations, although he had never seen the stars since he was very small.

There was a peanut butter marshmallow sandwich on a chipped floral plate by the door, too.  Five thought he might go wake up the fire-girl – the fire-woman, by now? – to thank her, but not yet.  He might tell her where he’d been; he might promise her the sky and so much room to breathe.

Five took a bite of the sandwich, first, kneeling in his father’s doorway.  He tasted something whole for the first time in much, much too long.


	6. Horror Becomes You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhh!!! Number six! The fairytales continue. :P Thank you so much for reading these~

_There was once a boy who grew up always knowing that he brought the ancient eldritch squirming things out to haunt his own home.  His father thought they needed the dark, the monsters, but he wanted to live in the light as long as he could._

There were seven children being studied in that hospital – seven children whose dreams were watched, whose blood was stored in rattling polished vials.  The walls were crisp, stark white, solid like a bank vault.  Nobody who wasn’t in a very serious lab coat walked by on the street outside.  There were the children, and there was their father the Doctor…  There were tangled empty hallways so easily made horrible with rot and gore and otherworldly writhing meat, and there were bedrooms filled with beeping machines and toys from an outside world the children had never seen.

One of the children knew _his own self_ was the very reason he had trouble sleeping at night; he was the reason that hospital was a skittering, eldritch place.  He kept the darkness inside him, and every so often the Doctor drew it out to use it.  To study it.  The Doctor called this child "the Horror," now.  Dramatic magazines that published his father’s work called him the Horror, too, and sometimes even the other children let those words chime out like an actual name.  The Horror didn’t think they should really count as a name, though.

It was hard not to feel ruinous, followed, dirty, with a name like that.  Other children might have worn it like a cackling badge, but the Horror had never wanted to scare anybody.

The Horror was a vessel for shifting forces vast beyond the reach of human worlds; he was a playmate that would always pass the ball when they cleared the cafeteria tables over to the wall to play soccer.  He stepped forward, chewing on the inside of his cheek, when his father had important guests in the hospital.  He demonstrated the sort of things that made fancy doctors shriek and gag and clutch their carefully sterilized hearts.

“C’mon,” said the Doctor-appointed leader of the children, sometimes, in a tired, trying-to-be-eager voice.  “We have to show Father’s associates everything we can do, remember?  We promised.”  _He_ was being tested for an incredible strength, in that hospital, and…  Sometimes, on days he didn’t like to talk about…  For a skin that wasn’t completely human, anymore.

“Hey, hey, if we take our turns fast and sneak away, we can probably go through their luggage,” the boy who could talk to the dead might have added, too, or something very much like that.  He was being studied in the hospital’s sour, crumbling old morgue too much of the time, lately, and there was a frantic look that never quite left his eyes.  He had taken things from the Doctor’s friends before, like skirts and jewelry and books that seemed to be about studying other children in different hospitals far away.  So maybe the whole world was like this.  Maybe even if they ran away from that place there would be nothing else.

The Horror hated when he had to demonstrate his “skills,” demonstrate his oddity for all the waiting strangers and his father with his very straight back and hospital coat.  He hated when his stark white uniform got splattered with blood because he’d been asked to demonstrate on…  Well.  On living things, living things now dangling sticky on the ceiling and staining his shirt.  He hated it.  But maybe more than anything, he hated how the _things_ whispered, when they came squirming out of his skin.

They were tentacles, thrashing and wild, uncoiling like tongues.  They were awful, but they weren’t _all_ there was of the beasts.  Not really.  The Horror let them reach through, just a little but no more.  It took all of himself to keep them wrangled in, sometimes, but it had to be done…  They were hungry for his world, he knew it.  If they could have slithered all the way through and wrestled control away from him, of course they would’ve done it in a second.  This wasn’t a parlor show – this wasn’t a game, not to them.

 _“Hello, little meat puppet.  Hello, stupid boy,”_ the things beyond the world, the things inside the Horror’s skin, hissed.  They would’ve liked to eat the other children in the hospital.  They would have liked to smash the pretty clean walls and punish the Horror for keeping them bound to his skin so much of the time instead of letting them free.

The Doctor said to do it again and again and again – let them glimpse the world, let them mangle, let them taste blood.  Again and again.  Was it any wonder the Horror felt their home was haunted?  He was poisoning it a little bit all the time.  Maybe he wouldn’t be able to control the things that could reach through his skin forever.  Maybe he could barely control them now.

Sometimes he sat in the hospital’s greenhouse, surrounded by plants and a lot of the vegetables they ate, grown by his father’s staff.  He sat in the sun, statue-still, and closed his eyes, willing the darkness that could reach through him to be melted away like snow on the road.  It was peaceful, in the light.  It was peaceful, but it wasn’t enough. 

One day things went very badly, one of the worst ways they could possibly go.  The Horror wouldn’t want us to talk about the details, yet.  Maybe he had been performing for a bunch of very official reporters; maybe he had been trying to sleep, fists clenched in his blankets and eyes wide open, scanning the dark corners of his room.  Maybe neither of those things – maybe something else, something stranger, something that would make the other children go pale and wrap their arms around themselves.  Either way, the Horror died.  He woke up in the hospital’s morgue surrounded by other huddled, broken people…  Dead people…  And overheard his father the Doctor talking about how his experiment had been a real disappointment.  Almost no new data.  It’s a pity the vessel couldn’t withstand a little more, couldn’t hold out.

The Horror shook his head and folded his hands into his uniform pockets.  For the first time, his father’s voice felt like a recording, felt hollow and static-y, like it shouldn’t have to matter to him at all.  He climbed upstairs, feeling eternal, feeling like he could’ve just drifted away if he wanted to…  But knowing he had something else to do, first.  He headed down the stark white halls and woke up the child who could talk to ghosts.

“I’m going to leave this place and see if there’s somewhere else you could live.  Anywhere else,” the Horror told the boy who could talk to ghosts.  “And if there is, I’ll come back and we can guide everyone there together.”

Being dead was an empty, awful thing.  No taste, no future, no growing old.  Not _yet_ , anyway – who’s to say what else the child who could talk to ghosts might do, as they grew up?  Especially if they grew up out in the living world, with grass outside their windows and the smell of that hospital’s chemical cleaner only a faint memory.  Even if the Horror couldn’t have it for himself, he wanted it for them.  The bitterness, the hurt and anger inside him, all of that was like another thrashing beast straining to rage, to punish.  It could’ve been enough to swallow him up, too, if he let it. 

But the Horror had a lot of practice keeping beasts like that quiet, nowadays.  He thought he could do it again.

The Horror slipped out of the hospital and into the world, looking for a new home for the other children, his family.  He chose himself a new name while he was out there, too.  “The Horror” had only ever been his name the way his father named plants in the greenhouse, named any sort of test subject at all.  Plants didn’t know and obey their given names, and neither would he, not ever again.        


	7. Play for Me, Too

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And – ta-da! Seven fairytales. :D!!! Thank you so much for sticking with these stories all the way to the end! Working on this project has been an absolute delight. I hope you enjoy this one… It turned out a little longer than I expected.
> 
> Have a wonderful day. :’)

_There was once a girl hidden in the catacombs under a theater, and she didn’t know anyone could hear her music at all until it was much too late._

It was a grand theater, with lots of velvety chairs and carved angels with hollow eyes and little smirking mouths like they knew plenty of secrets.  Almost everything was colored like dried blood and old sunken treasure chest gold; almost everything glittered in the light.  The little girl with the white violin had only ever seen the upper bits of this theater every now and then, and mostly when she was able to sneak up at night.  She imagined everything looked different, maybe hungrier, under moonlight.

The little girl knew there were six other children who performed at that theater from day to day to day — she knew because they were the closest thing she had to playmates, though mostly they talked and learned games all among themselves.  They practiced the lines the theater director they called “Father” had written for them; they picked out their costumes from huge painted chests, laughing softly in a way the girl with the white violin had never learned.  They went out during the day all the time, and wore beaded carnival masks that hid their eyes, silky black or lacy, hanging with feathers or silver like the moon.

Nobody had ever hidden the girl with the white violin’s eyes specifically, but she _was_ hidden, all of her.  She lived in the dripping places under the theater, where there were secret rooms full of abandoned props, half-built castles and monsters made out of metal and stained tarp.  There were flooded rooms, and hallways that just ended without reaching anything, and there was a little bed at the very bottom of everything.  A little bed with a cup for water on the nightstand and a pile of sheet music for the girl’s violin.

She stayed there nearly all the time, or she watched the children perform for their father and all his gaudy, laughing crowds.  The children danced out their roles sort of like cogs in a machine, she thought, watching from underneath their world, off to the edge of the stage.  The strong boy with a soft smile practiced his lines under his breath so much of the day, murmuring what his father needed from him down into his food as he ate and thinking over new scenes step-by-step before he fell asleep.  The sharp-eyed boy who hid knives in his boots sometimes declared that he was going to run away and start his own show, or maybe join the circus.  The girl with the white violin imagined herself as part of their show almost every time she watched it, but she learned not to say much about that as the years went by.

The strong boy who knew his lines better than his own thoughts raised the curtain before every performance — it was enormously heavy, and the girl with the white violin didn’t think she could lift it by herself.  She had tried, once or twice, all alone in the dark.  She’d thought maybe she would play her violin to the empty chairs and pretend they were filled with people.

In the end, though, the girl with the white violin played her music under the theater.  She poured everything she could feel into it, but it wasn’t enough to sound in the world, in her bones, just yet.  Maybe there was something in the water.

She grew up climbing through rafters and shuffling around underground passages with old costumes hanging on the walls like purposeless tapestries.  She grew into a woman with wide untrusting eyes and her violin strapped over her back nearly all the time like a weapon.

A strange man came to work at the theater, after a while, and he acted like he got lost very, very easily.  All six of the regular performers had to keep leading him away from the theater’s hidden spaces, reminding him that he could fall through the floor and drown in an underground lake far too easily, or lock himself down an unending corridor and starve to death.  He had been hired to build sets, and all the sets that needed him were out in the sun.  Why did he keep climbing deeper and deeper, to where the woman with the white violin stayed?

Only one of the performers — a woman with a voice like spellwork, who could speak anything to life — was very suspicious of the strange man.  Whenever he disappeared for a long time she hurried away, curls bouncing and brows furrowed, to try and find him.  She asked about him in town, too, and thought it was funny how nobody knew his name.

At night — for many nights — this strange man looked for the woman with the white violin.  When he finally found her, he helped her raise the curtain she didn’t think she could lift by herself.  He whispered sweet, poisonous things to her, and listened to her play from the first row of velvety, dried-blood seats.  He clapped so loud it made her feel alive.  He gave her something new to drink that got her head feeling wild and full of color, full of feelings she didn’t know what to do with.

He asked her to play her violin and think about love, and the room coiled with vines and secret dusky flowers.  He asked her to play and think about hope, and the room hung heavy with new constellations, with stars the way the woman with the white violin had always imagined them.  As she played, the theater shifted into new shapes around her.  Everyone woke up morning by morning and was so amazed.  A new parapet had been built overnight, maybe — the roof had sprouted new lacy golden sculpture, and everything was hanging with milky white jewels.

The performer who could speak anything to life was afraid this strange man was doing something wrong, something that would crack the theater into pieces, and...  She knew, she _knew_...  Break the woman with the white violin’s heart.  But the woman with the white violin had been playing her music for so long in dark and hollow places…  She refused to hear her.  In fact, her insides burned with an acid fury she hadn’t realized she could feel.

The first time this strange man asked the woman with the white violin to play a song about rage, it felt right.  It felt like he was trying to help her release herself.  When she heard the streets cracking apart outside and the houses crumbling, she was afraid.  Sure.  Of course.  But he held her carefully until she wasn’t, anymore.

They played so many songs about hate, by the end of things.  They played the sort of songs that shredded the theater curtain and split the rows of seats right down the middle, letting cold dirty water up from the flooded rooms below.  For a while, the theater didn’t perform any shows.  Everything was silent, except for the music from that white violin drifting up from under the world.

Soon enough – too soon – the woman with the white violin understood why this strange man she’d thought could love her had _really_ come to the theater.  He had plans, you know.  He had angers, too, and he’d wanted such a fine, raging new weapon.  An instrument of his own.  The woman with the white violin went colder inside, when she learned that.  She played an aria that scraped all this strange man’s meat off into the air, then.  She left him in pieces on the steps of the theater, where people used to sell tickets.

The theater director sent his six performers to contain the woman with the white violin, to prevent her dangerous music the way he had done before.  The man who practiced all his lines just right knew his job would be to follow in this father’s footsteps — knew that even if he hurt for the woman with the white violin, music like this came with so much blood.  He would blame himself for every person that hurt because of the woman with the white violin’s music, that bled into the velvety seats already colored like scabs, the same way he blamed himself whenever someone else tripped over their lines during a show.

But the woman who could speak anything to life held his arm and said, “I think I know what to do.  Let me handle this,” and even though maybe he didn’t _always_ listen...  Maybe he couldn’t _always_ resist taking a shaky breath and saying no, no, their responsibility was to order and their father and a dutifully polished theater without blood...  Let’s say he nodded, this time.  Smiled at her nervously.  Let’s say this time she was wearing a golden mask with flecks of dark opal in it, and the light caught in his eyes a little when he looked at her.  Trusting her, even if he couldn’t trust himself to remember his own lines so much of the time.

The woman who could speak anything to life ran a soft hand down the edge of this strong man’s mask and told him she would be right back.  She walked as confidently as she could to the center of the storm, where the woman with the white violin was taking the theater down to its bones, unearthing all its secrets.  She was playing hate and fear and panic; she was playing a life spent in the dark forbidden places, knowing there was something about her their father didn’t think deserved the light.

The woman who could speak anything to life smiled at this almost-stranger who was ripping their home to pieces, despite everything.  And despite everything, the woman with the white violin smiled back.

“Would you play a song for me, too?” the woman who could speak anything into being called.  It was a question, not a demand.  The woman with the white violin could have said no easily, if she wanted to.

The air went eerily still.  Pieces of broken sets and walls and velvety seats hung in the air all around them, poised, ready to drop or hurtle themselves right at the woman who could speak anything to life’s head.  The woman with the white violin had been drained of everything familiar.  Even her eyes were like two pale, staring stones at the bottom of a lake.

“What should I play?” she asked, after a long, terrified breath.

“I would like to be sisters,” said the woman who could speak anything to life.  The story didn’t always go like that, of course.  Maybe sometimes she couldn’t speak; maybe sometimes she didn’t go alone; maybe sometimes any number of things could come to be.  But let’s talk about this time.  Let’s talk about now.

The woman with the white violin thought about a sister’s song, and she shivered.  She said she wasn’t sure how to play a song like that, but maybe...  Here in this ruined place...  It would be alright to try.


End file.
